Campaign establishes a strong foundation before seeking votes through ads

Sanford's broad strategy in his 1986 Senate contest was to run on his record, he says. More specifically, he tried to set up a strong foundation of support before blanketing the state in television ads and attacking Sanford's opponent in his weak areas.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Terry Sanford, December 16 and 18, 1986. Interview C-0038. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

BRENT GLASS:

Yeah, well everything that's been written about the campaign
keeps talking about the brilliant strategy.

TERRY SANFORD:

Yeah, they called it a brilliant strategy because we won
[laughter].
But we did have a strategy, and we did stay true to it all the
way through, even when people were badgering me about not doing it a
different way. We stayed with the strategy.

BRENT GLASS:

What was that?

TERRY SANFORD:

Well, the strategy was to run on my record. The strategy was to organize
the counties and spend the summer doing that, not spend the summer
developing issues, not spend the summer even trying to get statewide
publicity, and certainly not to waste any money on television or radio
during the summer. But to get the ground work laid and then to come
strong in the fall with television, emphasizing and developing my
credibility on the basis of my record and then comparing his record and
my record. That was the broad strategy. Now tactically from time to time
we might not have done something that we would have anticipated
doing, but you don't always anticipate
your tactics. You can anticipate your strategy.
I would have had no way of knowing that we would have had to face the
issue of my being soft on communism, or coddling communists and weak on
defense. I might have guessed that he was going to hit me for weak on
defense. One reason that we used the parachute picture in the primary
[was to show] that I wasn't weak on defense. So just from a
point of view of tactics we certainly had to deal with what he dealt
with because part of our strategy was to take his issues and play his
cards against him, and if he indeed had issues that were damaging, to
end up making him look like the least reliable player. Say on
taxes—as it turned out in the final analysis he
was least trusted to keep taxes down, not me. I suppose we anticipated
their approach on that and it was probably a part of our overall
strategy.